Towards the beginning of the book of Exodus Moses has an encounter with God. Whilst looking after his father-in-lawâs flock he comes across a bush which is on fire, yet is not consumed by the fire. The angel of the Lord appears in the flame, and God calls to Moses from the bush.1 God identifies himself as âthe God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacobâ â this is the one who has entered into covenant with his people. Faithful to that covenant, and attentive to the distress of the Hebrew people in slavery, God pledges to bring them from slavery to freedom through Moses. Yet what if the people ask who has sent Moses for this task, Moses wonders, what should he say? God replies:
âI AM WHO I AM.â He said further, âThus you shall say to the Israelites, âI AM has sent me to you.ââ God also said to Moses, âThus you shall say to the Israelites, âThe LORD, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to youâ:
This is my name forever,
and this my title for all generations.2
What kind of a name is âI AMâ? And what kind of a choice is Moses given: either to use this mysterious name for the God who is calling him to liberate his people, or else to describe that God through his actions in the history of that people, âthe God of your ancestorsâ? Philosophers are now familiar with the suggestion that names have no content other than their reference to a particular entity.3 However it would be tin-eared in the extreme to appeal to this in order to diminish the suggestion that something out of the ordinary is being suggested in this narrative about human speech concerning God. Jewish tradition receives the tetragramatton âYHWHâ, the word translated âI AMâ, as profoundly holy, literally unspeakable. The text itself may be rendered, faithfully to the Hebrew, as God saying to Moses, âI will be who I will beâ, so there is a sense in which God is refusing to submit to naming under the guise of giving a name.4 Godâs name, so to speak, is âMind Your Own Businessâ. Theological reflection on the text has often dwelt on Godâs being âHe who isâ, the one who simply was, and is, and is to come.5 Aquinas, discussing the âsupreme suitabilityâ of the name âHe who isâ to God relates this to Godâs radical unknowability: we cannot know what God is during this life, therefore to use expressions of God which convey information is invariably to fall short. We do best, thinks Aquinas, to speak of God as he who is, the one who has being, since in saying that something is we are saying the most universal thing that can be said. And, thinks Aquinas, the more âuniversal and absolute [words]6 are, the more properly they are applied to God.â7
There is an important sense in which human beings cannot speak of God. The development of this thought is the task of this book. For now, I will simply state my conviction that there are severe limits on coherent theological language. In particular I think we cannot truthfully, or even intelligibly, say what God is. Yet a striking feature of the giving of the divine name to Moses is that the revelation of God as beyond our capacity for discourse does not disclose God as remote or coldly indifferent. On the contrary, God is revealed as ineffable â as Barth would say of revelation in Christ there is an unveiling which is also a veiling8 â and indeed as one who comes to his peopleâs aid. The unsearchable God is also the liberating God. She is also the God who will be worshipped as redeemer, appealed to in the light of the covenants, cried out to in grief, chided as absent, and thanked for blessings. The psalms stand testimony to the rich religious life within which prayer to God is made, yet even here we get a sense that our words are directed at a reality which itself escapes words. âYou thought that I was one just like yourself. But now I rebuke youâ.9 The need to preserve a sense of divine mystery when enquiring into religious language and the reality to which it points, yet to do so in a way compatible with there being a history of salvation and with the reality of living religion, is central to what follows.
It is difficult to imagine a text more thoroughly dissimilar to Exodus than Wittgensteinâs Tractatus Logicus Philosophicus (TLP ). Whatever exegetical difficulties have attached to TLP, it certainly seems to be a discussion of language and its relation to the world.10 Propositions picture states of affairs. True propositions picture states of affairs which in fact exist, that is they picture facts. Complex propositions are formed out of basic, or atomic, propositions, by the application of logical constants, which do not themselves refer to some special logical part of reality. Indeed the only reality available to be pictured is mundane and open to scientific scrutiny, âThe totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science (or the whole corpus of natural sciences)â.11 The job of philosophy, thinks Wittgenstein, is to draw within language a boundary to what can be said. This, on the face of it, is the task executed in TLP.
There is a problem, however. The propositions of TLP fall outside its own delimitation of the boundaries of sense. For if the function of language is to picture the world described by science, and if language does so by picturing that world, then the relationship of language to the world falls outside the domain that can be pictured. Since propositions only have sense in as much as they picture a possible state of affairs, propositions which purport to describe the relationship between language and the world are nonsense. In particular therefore, the propositions of TLP itself are nonsense, as Wittgenstein himself concedes,
6.54 My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them â as steps â to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it)
The usual understanding is that in TLP Wittgenstein directs us towards propositions which show what cannot, in his own terms, be said. Having come to see clearly how things stand with language, his reader will realise that the puzzles concerning reference and the structure of reality (and which Wittgenstein had inherited from Frege and Russell) are solved. Yet, says Wittgenstein in his introduction, this serves to demonstrate âhow little is achieved when these problems are solvedâ. What really matters lies beyond the bounds of what can be spoken. That which is higher, which lies beyond what can be pictured with words, includes for Wittgenstein absolute ethical demands, aesthetic value, and God.12 Whilst propositional pictures concern how things, contingently, happen to be,
6.432 How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world.6.4321 The facts all contribute to setting the problem, not to its solution.
Whatever the solution is must escape our words, in spite of a desire for it being awakened by reflection on our very use of words. In fact, the âmysticalâ passages in TLP arose out of Wittgensteinâs own eclectic religious sensibility, encouraged no doubt by his reading of Tolstoyâs Gospel in Brief during the First World War.13 However, there is a clear sense in which any reader who works through the book is herself supposed to both want to speak of those things that cannot be said and to understand precisely that they cannot be said. In this Wittgenstein brings us face to face with a pervasive truth: human beings quite readily ask questions about reality as a whole and our place in it, and when we do so we run up against the limits of our language. A key concern of mine here is to indicate how natural theology ends up having to acknowledge the inadequacy of language before the object of its enquiry. In this respect, as for Wittgenstein (and, as we will see, Aquinas before him), reason and rigorous enquiry do not stand opposed to mystery, but rather, when applied properly, lead us to it.
Apophaticism in Christian Tradition
This is neither an in...